TV tropes are the mainstay of modern entertainment.
My first thought when imagining Salma Hayeck in a 19’th century diving suit was – ‘Not sexy’. Then I imagined Salma Hayeck trying to get into and out of a 19’th century diving suit…
Who Hoo!

Anyway, Winston, I suspect you have turned your lettering into a font for easier wall-of-texting, is this true? Or are you still hand-lettering every one?

Also can you possibly switch to a CSS or javascript image viewer that has a magnifying glass function?

Man, I’m glad you’re popular and all these days but it’s a pain posting to a message board several hundred comments deep. Perhaps you should make people sign up to comment, with a captcha and all, probably would discourage the drunk/casual haters as well as the spam.

Speaking of TV Tropes: two months after I threw a half-arsed page for Subnormality! there it has hardly grown. Either WikiMagic is slower than I thought or hardly anyone cares about the comic. Either way, feel free to give the thing a more dignified shape:

We should definitely have to log in, sign up and walk through those funky direct-to-You-Tube full-body scanners at airport security in order to leave a comment here, because if there ever was a comic designed to appeal to joiners, this is it!

Hahaha…. You’ve kept up a great mix of the depressing, the bizarre, the uplifting, the flagrantly opinionated and the simply hilarious. I love the premise of this one, and the kickback to the Unpopular Halloween Costumes and similarly lighthearted comics. Keep up the variety and the incredible talent!

This one gave me a huge belly laugh. It was when I checked that the banner actually stood for the “Annual Beautiful Women in Unnecessarily … ” etc. Bearded guy – would this be before he was sent to a planet inhabited by ghosts or after? I say before, he doesn’t have the dark circles under his eyes.

Good stuff. As an aside, I love how every comic has a very different feeling on its comments. The first one sums up Subnormality fans perfectly. I’ve never seen a group of people so willing to criticise. I wander what makes that happen.

I love the “Welcome to Nineteenth Century America” sign. I need to put a sign in front of my apartment building saying “Welcome to the Turn of the Millenium” or something, with a cell-phone tower/antenna/thing and a Wi-Fi hotspot attached. In Comic Sans, since that seems to be the font of our Era.

And I’ll have to practice saying “I pwned a noob” so I fit the time-traveller’s expectations.

I really don’t know what to think of this one. Maybe it’s this slight cold that I’m suffering, but I can’t seem to get any of the above reactions. As usual, it’s well-drawn and, as someone above said, you are a font of creativity, but I really wonder whether you didn’t stretch yourself too far on this one. To be fair, this would be an incredibly hard comic to explain without the wall-o’-text, but I really have to wonder if, with this amount of explanation required, it was a joke really worth telling. If the joke is that situational – two people caught in some sort of fourth wall-breaking trope universe and were drinking on New Year’s Eve, etc., etc. – can you really compress all that into a single strip? I’m sure it could be absolutely hilarious as its own series, but this just feels rushed. The drawings are amusing as always, though, and I get the feeling that all I’m doing is earning the ire of the die-hard fans by yammering on against your trademark style.

Cute how the 19th century is all sepia-toned, like an old-time photo. And yeah, making magnification easier would be helpful. The walls of text are challenging enough without them being so damned hard to read *physically*.

simon: Nope, it’s not a font, just look closely and you can see the thousands of mistakes. As for it being hard to read, that’s come up a lot recently so maybe i’ll start making the jpegs a bit larger. That’s about as far as i can go unfortunately.

George: Yeah, he’s in a surprising amount of comics, though the art style changes so he’s probably harder to notice than i think he is.

Line Noise: Naw, no logins, no sign-ups. I haven’t noticed a problem with the comments here in the slightest. Quite the opposite in fact: there’s more great stuff being brought forth than i have time to respond to. And if the volume is in itself an issue for people, then i hope you can get past it ’cause i have no plans to limit comments.

Apachama: I would hope that no-one would feel hesitant in offering criticism around here. I mean, if i’m honest with myself i know when a comic isn’t up to standard, but it’s nice to have it confirmed. And no i am not being sarcastic. Receiving and learning to deal with criticism has been one of the fantastic things about doing this comic. I couldn’t be happier about that side of things.

The Last Melon: Yeah, it was kind of rushed to be honest. I mean, it still took a long time, but you’re right in that it most likely needed more time still due to the content. I don’t know, it’s definitely not my favorite comic, but there’s stuff in it that i like for sure. I think the potential for the ideas just wasn’t met, which is frustrating, but it’s not a total disaster. I’m not gonna cut it from the archives or anything, like i keep wanting to with that bus comic.

@Rob Retter: It depends on his use of color. In some strips there aren’t very many, and then you could take the original image, quantize it down to 256 colors, can convert it to PNG. The result of that conversion for the current strip looks like this: http://thomasokken.com/mariners.png. It looks pretty good but there are some noticeable differences. Using a better quantizer might give better results (I used pnmquant), or dithering would reduce the posterization effects, but would also spoil the PNG compression. Taking the JPEG and converting it straight to PNG results in an image that is actually larger than the original. Now, if I could experiment with one of Winston’s pre-JPEG originals…

I can’t help having a bad reaction to the “forced” exposition in the second panel, *even though* it’s part of the joke. However, I’m one of those people who finds purposefully bad jokes annoying, while others enjoy them. (Have you seen The Muppet Show? I can’t stand the Fozzie segments, which employ that form of humor.)

I must say that the breathless ramble was beautiful, though. I read it all in one continuous stream, and the wind-down (sloth, rice) was excellent.

I guess you’ll always have some jokes that appeal to some people and annoy others. I suppose it’s your choice whether to pick an audience segment to try to please, or be all over the map style-wise and take flak for it. I’d support the latter, but I’m not the one who has to deal with the comments.

“pG: Goddamn it, now you’ve ruined the premise!” – Hey, I just call them like I see them.
phoney – Cousteau invented the Aqualung or SCUBA gear, which made those hideously facinating suits look overengineered and a bit ridiculous. Like Paris Hilton’s face.

I like the diving suits, and the last panel is funny. The text wall… doesn’t work. It seems intentionally stretched out, and doesn’t flow at all. I can imagine it sounding funny spoken aloud, but in this form it’s just tedious.

Nothing quite leaves me feeling “tl;dr” like your comic.
I guess this is how other folk feel when I start ranting about stuff.
Like I’m looking over the comic, and everything seems fine… and then OMGHUGEBLOCKOFTEXT. And my mind had enough of actually trying to read them hours ago, so it just skips that bit and hopes that I didn’t miss anything relevant (and generally I find that to be an accurate assessment).
Then my paranoia pipes up and reminds me that I could possibly be missing something important or inspiring, or at the very least interesting in the midst of all that text… but it still doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Then that deformed gremlin representing my introspective self-critical side or somesuch starts making uncomfortable observations.
And he is all like “… You do that quite a lot too, y’know” … and “People probably can’t be bothered when you do it either”….
Then everything ends with me sitting in the corner, stewing in self-loathing at my own reprehensible hypocrisy.

Eventually reason pipes up though, and reminds me:
“The validity of the criticism is independent of your participation in the criticised action. Likewise the hypocrisy.”

And finally both my inner Taoist and Nihilist note:
“This really isn’t worth thinking about. Just chill and do whatever. Be the hypocrite. Doesn’t matter anyway.”

I come to this comic EVERY day, knowing there will likely not be a new “comic with too many words,” and if there’s not a new comic, then I click on the Sphinx in order to revisit a bunch of fine old comics! Great time-hole.